source avatarMax Avery

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Is this the end of the "not your keys" era for BTC? Bitcoin was built around the idea that nobody touches your coins without your private key. Not governments, not banks, not developers. Now developers are proposing something that breaks it. BIP-361, led by Jameson Lopp, is a three-phase plan to freeze Bitcoin held in quantum-vulnerable addresses Early address types exposed public keys by design, and a powerful enough quantum computer could reverse-engineer a private key from a public one Estimates put roughly 1.7 million BTC (including Satoshi's) sitting in addresses that have this problem The plan (as proposed) is that three years after activation, no more sending BTC to old-style addresses Two years after that, legacy signatures become invalid and any coins that haven't migrated are frozen A third phase would let people recover frozen coins using zero-knowledge proofs tied to their seed phrase, though that part is still under research

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